World War II Lethal Dart Gun – Code name Bigot

That never worked out

Once upon a time during WWII a lethal dart gun code name “Bigot” was created to be used by commandos to covertly eliminate sentries, this dart gun was constructed from a M1911 .45 caliber pistol. The Office of Strategic Services predecessors of the CIA developed this clandestine weapon, its unknown as to what advantage this has over a silenced pistol. The weapon never made it out of the research and development department, but this didn’t stop Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons to get their hands on one to check out, see the video below.

According to Ion McCollum of Forgotten Weapons who shot a reproduction of the “bigot”, here’s what he observed:
” the reproduction darts had a maximum range of about 10 feet. I fired a total of six darts at a glass bowl target roughly 8 feet away, and the result was two darts hitting and breaking the glass, two darts hitting the glass and bouncing off, and two darts failing to make it to the glass bowl. Not exactly lethal.”

“Now, of course, the original darts with a better gas seal and more powder would have had a higher muzzle velocity and a longer range, but I suspect that the reason the project was eventually abandoned was an inability to get the darts moving fast enough to be useful at any reasonable distance. Some people have speculated that the Bigot was designed to throw lines or for use underwater, and my experience suggests that it would have been radically underpowered for either of those uses.”

In summary, the “bigot” isn’t effective as a standard suppressed .45 ACP 1911 pistol. However, the weapon would be a great piece for a cocktail conversation amongst James Bond fans.

Video Transcription:
Ian: Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video episode on Forgottenweapons.com, I’m Ian and we have a very interesting old pistol to show you today. This is a Bigot. ‘Least that’s the codename that the OSS gave this particular modification to the 1911. The idea here, these were developed in World War Two, and I believe they were used to shoot sentries very quietly. Why exactly they would do this instead of a silencer, I’m not entirely sure, but you do see these referenced in books about World War Two clandestine equipment. Again, the codename for the device is ‘The Bigot’, and it’s a modification to an otherwise stock-standard 1911 pistol. The idea is, it shoots this rather nasty-looking finned dart.

So the main functional part of the Bigot is this modification. This is the device itself, basically. This goes into the barrel of the gun in two parts. The front– This piston is what the dart rides on, then we have this rear piece that sits in the chamber of the 1911 barrel. It’s shaped here at the back to fit nicely in, then the center piston threads nicely into it. So you put this in through the ejection port, then you run this in through the barrel, thread it down like so. Now the firing pin on this particular one has been stuck forward. I think because it was originally made with a very tight fit, and it’s fairly old and it hasn’t been used. what would normally happen is, we have this very long firing pin running the length of this whole device, and in the back here, you can see it’s centered in there. So when you fire the pistol, the firing pin of 1911 firing pin hits that, that pushes out the firing pin on the Bigot device, and this dart actually has a basically a 25 caliber blank cartridge up in the nose. So it slides in like this, firing pin hits here, transmits up to here, then the bigot firing pin up here detonates this little blank cartridge, that produces a ton of gas pressure up here, which pushes this dart off of this rod and out downrange. The fins are a second piece that slides smoothly on the dart body so that when you load this you can load the dart all the way into the barrel, and the fins up at the muzzle, and when it fires it can slide down to the back. Let’s go ahead and put this back together and it’ll make a little more sense.

So we take the two components apart, go ahead and drop this one into my 1911 barrel, and then this piston comes in through the back, threads in place like so, –there are a couple little grooves here so you can get a nice solid grip on this– then if we look at this, you can see the rear-end of this contraption. What we wanna do is put this exactly– you can see it slides nicely into the chamber, and we want it set just right so that the barrel will still close. If you don’t have it rotated to exactly the right position it’ll lock the gun up. I think this is as good a time as any to point out that this was not ever a major production item. I’m not sure if these were ever actually even used, so the fact that it’s really finnicky– you might say it’s an outright bad idea. Didn’t stop them from making a couple. Now this is a normal pistol, I have just added this piston and chamber device in there, and my firing is all pretty much contained in this dart. So what I would do is load a dart, there’s a nice, mechanical, fairly tight seal there. I’ll drop the ends over the muzzle of the gun, and there we go. Now I cock the gun, and I can go about firing it, and when I fire it, it’ll go shoot that dart out. Should I want to fire a second time, all I have to do is put another dart in, because the nose of the gun contains the blank cartridge that powers it. If I then need to revert this back to being a regular forty-five, all I have to do is go about unthreading the piston, drop out the chamber component, and insert magazine of .45 cartridges. And away you go!

Alright, so you might think it’s cool enough that we have one of these bigot pistols, but not only do we have that, we have five different types of dart for them. This is the one that we were looking at in the gun, and this is I believe the one that you normally see pictures of. Sliding fins, and the fins are normally notched to go give you some clearance around the muzzle of the gun. But! We also have, for example, this one– smaller fins, same basic idea, and in this case the front end is threaded so that you can take the tip off, presumably, to load the blank cartridge. Whereas on the first style of dart, the blank is set from the factory. We also have a slightly different arrangement, the tip on this is very much like the first one, but these fins are fixed in place here, so this dart only goes about halfway onto the muzzle. This only goes that deep on there. Why eactly this was done, I don’t know, it may simply have been an experiment to see if fins up in the midsection of the dart would work as well, there were also– we have a test one here that has no fins at all. It sits all the way down. And the most interesting one: This guy, you’ll notice the body of this dart is larger in diameter than any of the others, and if we look close here, the back end is of this pre-rifled to match a .45 1911 barrel. So with this guy –and this is just really cool– this fits right in the muzzle, and what I do is you rotate it, and it will actually fit the rifling. It’s a lot tougher to load, it’s slow, but it will just follow the rifling and slowly rotate as you load it from the muzzle. Then when you fire it, obviously, the rifling spins it back out and in theory at least, you have a nice, accurate projectile. We’d love to find some testing data on these to find out what style they ended up finding to be the most useful or most effective, but I’m not sure we’re ever going to find that kind of documentation. We’re always looking.

Alright, and in case that wasn’t enough for you, if we have any James Bond types out there, We also have grenades. ‘Cuz what’s a pistol if you can’t shoot a grenade off of it? This is the exact same idea, we have a tube that fits down the barrel, we have a blank case in the bottom, slide it on, this is actually very similar to a rifle grenade. Sort of. Given that it has a blank cartridge in there. We’ve got two different sizes here, big one and a little dinky one. How’s that for cool? So we have no idea what the history of these guys is, whether these were actually ever used, whether they were purely experimental , for all I know they were handmade by someone who got their hands on one of these pistols and thought it would be neat to do. Which it totally is. So these were, like I said, developed by the OSS -the Office of Strategic Services- during World War Two, I’ve no idea if they were actually ever used, we’re very lucky to find an actual example of one to take a look at and show you guys. So I hope you liked this, I know I did, tune in again for more interesting gun stuff on ForgottenWeapons.com. Thanks for watching!